Johannesburg uni stampede kills one

A stampede by students desperate to enrol at South Africa's University of Johannesburg has left one woman dead and 17 people injured, one critically.

Students and their parents had lined up to apply for last-minute places at the university, one of the few schools to accept late applicants in January, the start of the school year in South Africa.

The crowd had waited throughout the night and the stampede happened on Tuesday morning just after the main gate was opened at the university's Bunting Road campus in the Auckland Park area of Johannesburg.

The victim was said to be the mother of a prospective student, according to the South African Press Association. Another woman, also said to be the mother of a student applicant, was critically injured in the stampede.

There is a shortage of spots at South Africa's top universities. Many students apply late after receiving their results from official exams at the end of high school.

By Monday, a kilometre-long line of potential students had formed at the university's gate, and 5,000 applications were received that day.

Following the incident, the University of Johannesburg suspended registrations of students. But many waiting parents and students refused to leave. Police and ambulances remained at the scene to maintain order.

Last year there were 11,000 first-year spots available at the university, according to Johannesburg's Times newspaper. Last year the university turned away 74,000 students.

More than 180,000 high school graduates are expected to be turned away from South Africa's nine top universities this year, said Johannesburg's Times newspaper.

Another university in Johannesburg, the University of the Witwatersrand, has 5,500 spots for freshman students and received 30,000 applications last year, the Times said.

The youth wing of the ruling African National Congress party released a statement sending "its deepest condolences" to the family of the victim, who "died in pursuit of education for her child," but also criticising the education ministry for a shortage of university spots.

The government "should acknowledge the fact that the inability to institutions of higher learning to admit the entirety of learners who are eligible for higher education is reaching a crisis level," the ANC Youth League statement said.

"The ANC government should ensure that no eligible student is excluded from institutions of higher learning, because such will deepen societal ills of unemployment, poverty, starvation, crime, and inequalities."

The University of Johannesburg was created after apartheid by the merger of the former Rand Afrikaans University, the Technikon Witwatersrand and the Soweto and the East Rand campuses of Vista University.